Bertrand Russell Quotes

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Mathematics is only the art of saying the same thing in different words.

Bertrand Russell
Men sometimes speak as though the progress of science must necessarily be a boon to mankind, but that, I fear, is one of the comfortable nineteenth century delusions which our more disillusioned age must discard.

Bertrand Russell
In adolescence, I hated life and was continually on the verge of suicide, from which, however, I was restrained by the desire to know more mathematics. Now, on the contrary, I enjoy life; I might almost say that with every year that passes I enjoy it more.

Bertrand Russell
The finding of arguments for a conclusion given in advance is not philosophy, but special pleading

Bertrand Russell
It is permissible with certain precautions to speak in print of coitus, but it is not permissible to employ the monosyllabic synonym for this word.

Bertrand Russell
Logic is concerned with the real world just as truly as zoology [is].

Bertrand Russell
Man is a part of Nature, not something contrasted with Nature.

Bertrand Russell
Very few men can be genuinely happy in a life involving continual self-assertion against the skepticism of the mass of mankind, unless they can shut themselves up in a coterie and forget the cold outer world. The man of science has no need of a coterie, since he is thought well of by everybody except his colleagues. The artist, on the contrary, is in the painful situation of having to choose between being despised and being despicable.

Bertrand Russell
But we are not likely to find science returning to the crude form of causality believed in by Fijians and philosophers of which the type is "lightning causes thunder."

Bertrand Russell
The sea, the stars, the night wind in waste places, mean more to me than even the human beings I love best.

Bertrand Russell
The pleasure in planned construction is one of the most powerful motives in men who combine intelligence with energy; whatever can be constructed according to a plan, such men will endeavor to construct.

Bertrand Russell
There seems scarcely any limit to what could be done in the way of producing a good world, if only men would use science wisely.

Bertrand Russell
It is one of the defects of modern higher education that it has become too much a training in the acquisition of certain kinds of skill, and too little an enlargement of the mind and heart by an impartial survey of the world.

Bertrand Russell
A generation educated in fearless freedom will have wider and bolder hopes than are possible to us

Bertrand Russell
Science is what you more or less know and philosophy is what you do not know.

Bertrand Russell
Amid wars and rumours of war, while the acrimonies of disarmament conferences threaten the human race with unprecendented disaster, another conflict perhaps more important is receiving much less notice than it deserves - I mean the conflict between men and insects.

Bertrand Russell
Skilled work, of no matter what kind, is only done well by those who take a certain pleasure in it, quite apart from its utility, either to themselves in earning a living, or to the world through its outcome.

Bertrand Russell
The mind of the most rational among us may be compared to a stormy ocean of passionate convictions based upon desire, upon which float perilously a few tiny boats carrying a cargo of scientifically treated beliefs.

Bertrand Russell
Curious learning not only makes unpleasant things less unpleasant but also makes pleasant things more pleasant.

Bertrand Russell
The solution of the difficulties which formerly surrounded the mathematical infinite is probably the greatest achievement of which our age has to boast.

Bertrand Russell
We are on the threshold of utter disaster or unprecedented glorious achievement. No previous age has been fraught with problems so momentous; and it is to science that we must look for a happy issue.

Bertrand Russell
Dimensions, in geometry, are a development of order. The conception of a limit, which underlies all higher mathematics, is a serial conception. There are parts of mathematics which do not depend upon the notion of order, but they are very few in comparison with the parts in which this notion is involved.

Bertrand Russell
The pure mathematician, like the musician, is a free creator of his world of ordered beauty.

Bertrand Russell
It is poetic imagination, not science, which presents Time as despotic lord of the world, with all the irresponsible frivolity of a child.

Bertrand Russell
All great books contain boring portions, and all great lives have contained uninteresting stretches.

Bertrand Russell
So far as scientific evidence goes, the universe has crawled by slow stages to a somewhat pitiful result on this earth, and is going to crawl by still more pitiful stages to a condition of universal death.

Bertrand Russell
A man's acts are partly determined by spontaneous impulse, partly by the conscious and unconscious effects of the various groups to which he belongs.

Bertrand Russell
The idea that physicists would in future have to study the theory of tensors created real panic amongst them following the first announcement that Einstein's predictions had been verified.

Bertrand Russell
Marx's father became a Christian when Marx was a little boy, and some, at least, of the dogmas he must have then accepted seem to have born fruit in his son's psychology.

Bertrand Russell
The best authorities are unanimous in saying that a war with H-bombs might possibly put an end to the human race. It is feared that if many H-bombs are used there will be universal death, sudden only for a minority, but for the majority a slow torture of disease and disintegration.

Bertrand Russell